


Ash

by themillersson



Category: Glee
Genre: Apocalypse, Implied Character Death, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-09
Updated: 2010-06-09
Packaged: 2017-10-22 08:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themillersson/pseuds/themillersson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world doesn't end the way Puck expects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ash

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Post-Season 1

The world doesn’t end the way Puck would have expected, if he'd ever really thought about it.

-

Ash has been falling for weeks. They can’t tell where it’s coming from, and the wind changes so often that trying to guess is a waste of time. From the last radio signals Kurt had been able to catch, it’s like this at least from Chicago to Bethesda. There was no news coming from west of Illinois even before they left Ohio and got out of range.

Puck is mostly certain they’re heading south.

Gray drifts pile up on roads and against buildings. The roofs that haven’t caught fire cave in under the softly gritty blanket. Everything is quiet except for the dull engine sound and the odd squeaking of the wheels and the soft breaths of the two people in the car.

-

Puck isn’t sure why there are so few people. At first, he’d tried to pretend that everyone had just made it out of Lima safely, had left him behind when the fires started. He figured it was a douche move, but he understood the need to take care of someone, even if it hurts someone else. And it was a better thought than the alternative.

He’d woken up late to total silence apart from his cell phone alarm going off hours after the time he’d set it to. It looked like snow was falling outside his window, but it was the wrong time of year and the falling flakes were too dark. Discomfiting thoughts tugged at his mind but he shrugged them off as always.

He had wandered Lima’s deserted streets, a jacket held over his head to protect him from cinders and a wet cloth pressed to his mouth and nose to keep him from breathing ash. Slowly, he realized that everyone else was just gone – he didn’t know why. The power lines and cell towers were all down by the time he thought to check, his cell blinking ‘no signal,’ so it wasn’t as if he could contact anyone. No one answered when he tried to bang on doors and windows, and the one time he walked into a house with its door hanging ajar, he left immediately after. There were things he wasn’t ready to accept yet (he had known the woman, had serviced her pool once – he remembered her vanilla perfume and c-section scar).

As he made his way through the empty town, it had been more surreal than scary; a disquieting bad dream that he would wake up from soon.

He didn’t know how long he had wandered before he took shelter under the overhang of a porch to shake off the accumulated ash. And then there was a crackling sound that he didn’t recognize until too late. He managed to hurl himself away from the house in time to avoid being crushed to death by the first avalanche of smoldering timber and plastic siding, but something caught him in the back and he was pinned face-first in the ash. He had coughed and sputtered, trying not to choke or be suffocated by the burning weight on his back, had thrashed to try and get free of it. He choked on a mouthful of ash and had a painfully lucid second where he realized that this wasn’t a dream, after all. He was about to die on someone’s once-pristinely manicured lawn, surrounded by debris, crushed or burned to death by something he couldn’t even see, and ash would blanket his body like snowfall.

He remembered shapes under the ash on other lawns, in streets, and gritted his teeth against the realization.

When the weight on his back lifted slightly, he didn’t question it. He instinctively took advantage and dragged himself forward and out from under the crushing pressure. Free, he rolled onto his back to see Kurt Hummel, of all people, letting go of a piece of the house’s siding with a small sound of exertion. Ash flew up in small billows from the debris as it hit the ground. Puck stared at him, forgetting to get back to his feet despite the ash steadily floating down and the stray sparks from the collapsed house drifting toward them both (his eyes stung and his throat burned and his back hurt, but he didn’t want to consider the damage yet).

Someone was alive, he realized. Someone else was there.

-

Puck glances away from the road long enough to look at Kurt in the passengers seat. Kurt is slumped against the window, and Puck can’t tell if he’s asleep or just staring at the monotonous gray landscape. They’ve both been quiet for miles. Since Chattanooga, he thinks. Sometimes Puck sings under his breath while he drives, but he hasn’t heard Kurt’s voice for the past few days. It bothers him in a way he once thought it never would, the absence pricking at his mind.

-

The day everything ended, Hummel had stared at him in open disbelief, but already the usual scorn was gone and there was no haughty lift to his nose anymore. All that was left were wide reddened eyes and dust smudged across his face, ash matting his hair. Then he composed himself and extended a hand to help Puck up.

Puck took it, for lack of other options.

-

He steals another glance at Kurt. A flicker of blue (pale, washed to gray by the dim light) shows that Kurt is staring out the window, after all. Puck doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Most of the signs still standing are illegible. If they aren’t covered in ash, the paint has been blasted off by one of the occasional freak windstorms (ash-storms, he supposes – like sandstorms in a desert). Buildings have mostly collapsed. They can’t be sure that they’re still on the road, but there are faint tire treads they can drive in, so they know that wherever they’re going, someone else has gone before. Maybe they can even meet them.

They’ve been following that solitary set of treads ever since the ash became too thick to forge their own way. Puck pretends it’s a sign, a direction.

The gray light is dimming, so Puck assumes it’s evening. At some point during Kurt’s tinkering with the radio, trying to get one last signal as if it were the car’s radio that was at fault, not the absence of people to make broadcasts, the clock had somehow gone off. Since Kurt apparently lost his watch before they left and Puck’s battery ran out (until a few weeks ago, he’d assumed he’d be near a store when it happened and that he’d have the luxury of fixing it), they’ve been following the pattern of weak sunlight to know when it’s time to stop and rest. They probably could drive through the night (it’s not as if there’s anything they’ll run into anymore), but they don’t want to risk losing the tracks.

The engine coughs and Kurt finally shows a sign of life, straightening in his seat and listening to the noise intently.

Puck sighs. He hasn’t seen a sheltered place to pull over for miles, so Kurt will have to work quickly again to keep ash from falling in when he opens the hood. And Puck will do his best to follow Kurt’s terse instructions (if he gives any this time), muffled by the rag held to his mouth, and feel as useless as he always does when it isn't his turn to drive.

-

They had combed through the town together. Hummel supported Puck’s weight, wordlessly tried to compensate for his limp, and Puck realized for the first time that they were nearly the same height. Rain began to fall, mixing with the ash to form a kind of sleet and weighing down the ash already fallen to earth. The sodden ash made walking difficult for both of them and caused roofs to groan under its weight.

Once they had no choice but to realize that they were the only living people left – Puck didn’t know why, couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that of all the bodies in the town (too many familiar) only the two of them weren’t lying still under ash or collapsed homes – they made their way to Hummel’s car. It was still waiting in the family’s driveway (not the neat parking job Puck always associated with him – he didn’t ask why, not when the house itself was still smoldering). Puck wanted to ask why they were leaving, why not just stay in Lima and wait for… something. Maybe someone else was alive and looking for them. But then the now-familiar roar of a house succumbing to the weight of wet ash came from nearby and Puck didn’t want to watch the rest of Lima disintegrate, either. He could suffer his false hopes on the road as easily as anywhere else.

-

They stop in the middle of the road after all. Puck watches Kurt duck under the open hood and fiddle with something and he tries not to think that he still doesn’t know where his mother and sister are. Or Quinn (or Beth). He pretends that they made it out fine and are looking for him somewhere. They’ll meet each other when the ash stops falling, and they’ll build up as much of their old life as they can.

-

He had asked Hummel where Finn was. They were living together, after all. Hummel had turned away.

-

When Kurt climbs back into the car, coughing from the ash and eyes watering, Puck doesn’t turn the key right away. He just looks at him. Kurt can barely meet his eyes, and Puck is overcome by a surreal sense of intangibility. Puck reaches over and roughly brushes the gray flakes off Kurt’s hair, just to be sure. He ignores the way he startles at the contact, and wonders if Kurt has anything to still pretend.

That night the temperature drops lower than before. Puck thinks it has something to do with the sun being blocked out, says so. Kurt just nods. He still doesn’t speak.

Puck sees him shivering in his reclined seat when they try to go to sleep that night. After what feels like an hour of watching his frame shake, he grabs a ruined sleeve (Kurt hasn’t said a thing about the state of his clothing and it’s as surreal as anything else these days) and tugs until Kurt awkwardly climbs over the armrest and joins him in the backseat. Puck doesn’t look at him directly, but pulls him close so that they’re wrapped up in each other under the comforter they found in an abandoned house three days out of Lima. Kurt stops shivering eventually and even whispers his thanks.

Puck almost jumps at the sound. He misses the barbed words.

They pull over at a rest stop a day later. The fuel here hasn’t caught fire yet, so they can fill the car’s nearly empty tank again. Puck waits with the car while Kurt goes inside to activate the pump. Gray drifts and abrasion occlude anything that might be visible through the plate-glass windows, and Puck is a little surprised that the building is still standing.

Kurt comes out with an armful of bottled water and jerks his head toward the pump, indicating that it’s okay to start using it. Puck does so as Kurt loads in the water and goes back to see if anything else can be salvaged (the first time, they felt guilty until Puck saw the dead station attendant’s necklace and was able to awkwardly say the Kaddish Avelim over her corpse – he knew he wasn’t doing it right, but it was something; Kurt had stopped to watch with something like curiosity).

By the time Puck finishes filling the tank and the two spare containers in the trunk, Kurt has already made two trips back with supplies. Puck realizes that the third trip is taking longer than it should, but he just shrugs as he opens the door to help him out.

And then he sees the first other living person since Lima.

It’s some older guy, maybe in his fifties, but it’s hard to tell with the way he’s let his beard cover his face. He’s wearing a stained uniform, Puck figures he was the station attendant, but now he just looks insane. The man has Kurt on the ground and is trying to hold him down with one hand and wave around a gun in the other. It’s pointed mainly at Kurt, but he’s kicking the man and trying to knock the gun out of his hand, so he’s not having an easy time of it. As Puck watches, frozen (even though he’s screaming at his body to move, he can’t get over the impossibility that there’s someone else), Kurt actually fucking bites the man’s wrist. The man curses loudly and backhands Kurt, but in the process he lets go of him, so Kurt viciously elbows him in the sternum, driving him backwards.

Puck finally gets his act together and dives forward, tackling the man away from Kurt (his body remembers the movement from football, and for a second he’s on the lit-up green field at McKinley and not in a dingy gas station enshrouded in ash, trying to separate a madman from his gun). Kurt latches onto the man’s arm and wrestles the gun away, then scrambles away and stands to back up, holding it steady and aimed at him. Puck shoves the man away and joins Kurt near the doorway. There’s a second of stillness.

He’s in the middle of demanding an explanation when the man stumbles to his feet and lunges forward. Kurt fires.

Puck doesn’t know if he meant it as a warning shot, doesn’t know if he hopes that he did or not, but the man keeps charging for a few feet before he staggers, falls to the floor right at Puck’s feet.

Puck’s ears are still ringing from the gunshot, but he can still hear Kurt’s ragged breathing, sees his shoulders shaking as he lowers the gun. He doesn’t know what to do, so he takes a step back from the corpse, wraps an arm around Kurt’s shoulders.

-

As they stumbled around Lima, Hummel steadying Puck and trying not to touch his back, the other boy had done his best to explain what he knew. It wasn’t much and he faltered over his words, too few actually getting out to be very helpful (no wit, no clever jabs, it was as if someone else were speaking). From what Puck could piece together, he had been locked in a closet somewhere when the ash started to fall. By the time he broke out, everything was over. And that was all.

Puck wanted to ask about the other students, about their friends and everyone he knew, but he didn’t. Hummel didn’t mention them, either.

-

Kurt insists that they stay under the shelter of the gas station roof long enough to clean the ashes out of the car. Puck would rather get them both away from the man’s body as soon as possible, but Kurt says that the trapped ash will destroy the engine eventually, and Puck concedes, doesn’t point out that Kurt’s voice and hands are still shaking.

Before they leave, Kurt resolutely goes back in, stepping around the corpse, and comes back with a bag of disposable razors and grooming supplies. His eyes dare Puck to say anything about it. Puck doesn’t try to tease him until they’re on the road again. Kurt is still staring out the window, but the dead look is gone and he has finally stopped trembling, so Puck makes a tentative dig at his fondness for preening. It’s weak by his old standards, but they haven’t said anything not related to survival since the first few days. Kurt startles, but then narrows his eyes and snidely remarks that the apocalypse is no excuse for poor hygiene.

That’s weak, too, but Puck feels a smile tugging at his lips.

-

Lima was empty except for them and the bodies lying cold and still. Puck didn’t try to count how many were people he knew, tried not to lean too heavily on Hummel as he helped him into the car. When they passed Puck’s house on the drive out, though, he had to clench his jaw and fight back tears. There was a lot of ash on the roof already. He knew it wasn’t going to last long.

-

They eventually catch up with the car making the tracks.

The ash is still falling steadily, but there’s less of it now, and Puck doesn’t know if it’s because it’s ending or they’re reaching the end of its extent (either way is equally incomprehensible). The layer coating the road is thinner and they don’t need to follow the treads anymore, but they still do, for lack of a better plan.

They talk a little while they roll on, the car’s pace still maddeningly slow through the ash. The conversation is delicate and careful still, but Puck feels a little more real himself now that someone is responding to his words, maybe never laughing, but smiling softly at times. They talk about music, mostly. Sometimes one of them will mention a song that someone sang in Glee and there will be a noticeable hole in the conversation, but they carefully skirt around it and move on.

And then the treads ahead of them start to swerve. Puck frowns and doesn’t follow the weaving pattern, deviating from the lines of packed ash for the first time. He thinks they might both be holding their breath.

It turns out to be a Jeep of some sort. They can’t see much of it because somehow it crashed into the only telephone pole left standing (and really, Puck wonders, how the fuck does that even happen?). The entire front is crushed, and they know what they’ll find even before they get out and go to check.

It was a man and a woman. An older couple. Neither is moving, and when Kurt and Puck check, neither has a pulse. Puck doesn’t want to look at the damage from the crash, wonder what happened. He doesn’t know if they were Jewish or not, but he pretends that they were for now and whispers under his breath. He hopes it will help, even if they can’t bury them. Kurt surprises him by haltingly murmuring the responses back, almost at the right times.

He still feels guilty when the siphon the gas out of the wrecked car, but they don’t take anything out of it and before they get back into their car, Kurt pulls him close under the falling ash and, shivering, presses their dry lips together. Puck lets him.

-

When they left Lima, they both kept their eyes on the road ahead.

-

It’s warmer that night than before, but they still huddle together. Puck tells himself that it’s just Kurt that needs it. And then Kurt startles him by speaking into the dark silence. He tells a story, not a very elaborate one by his standards, about the first time Finn tried to use the shower in their house and managed to scald himself, trip into the wall, and tear down the shower curtain within five minutes. Puck feels himself smile, responds with one about Quinn’s mania for bacon developing after living in his house for only three days. Kurt laughs softly. They slowly begin to speak of their friends, of their families. Kurt even tries to follow along with Puck’s football stories. They use the past tense and talk only about things that happened before, but it feels right, less painful than Puck expected. Tired gossip takes on an odd freshness. Simple reminiscences carry a new weight.

When they’ve worn themselves out and their voices are growing raspy from the unaccustomed use, they stop and just look at each other. Puck swallows and leans in to kiss Kurt, and it’s awkward and slow and fumbling, but eventually they curl together, just feeling the rise and fall of each other’s chests. Puck doesn’t remember when they fall asleep.

-

In the second their eyes locked after Hummel saved Puck’s life, Puck had run though a million thoughts all at once. Someone else was alive, maybe that meant the others were too. Maybe Hummel knew where other people were. And since when was the kid strong enough to lift a chunk of burning building like that? It was a little freaky, the way he had just singed his sleeves but didn’t seem to care that he looked like a mess for once. How was he still alive when Puck had seen no one else? God, why Hummel, why not Finn or Quinn or his mother or…

-

The ash stops falling. It still coats everything, but there’s less of it and they’re finally able to drive marginally faster than the twenty-miles-an-hour they were forced into before. Most of the buildings have still collapsed, but Puck is starting to hope they’re reaching the end of the devastation when Kurt frowns and tells him to look at the debris under the ash. Puck does, and is reminded of photos in newspapers from years ago. Uprooted trees, splintered boards, patches of sand where the ash has blown away.

Kurt makes them stop when they pass a car that looks intact so that he can scavenge it for spare parts. Puck shrugs and takes the opportunity to poke around outside, glad that for the first time, he doesn’t have to worry about breathing through cloth to avoid inhaling ash. He doesn’t find any footprints except for their own, even along the road, but he does catch a glimpse of a smashed boat wedged under a fallen oak, the foundation of a house buried in sand, and a child’s toy car. He looks at the last for a long time, but eventually turns away. He saunters back when Kurt yells that he’s finished.

Kurt doesn’t question it when Puck pulls him into an embrace and holds him too tight, just clings back almost as fiercely. Puck doesn’t realize he’s crying until Kurt is rubbing circles on his back and humming something quietly. He realizes it’s “Beth” and thinks that maybe Kurt saw it, too.

-

Puck has been to Lake Erie twice in his life. It didn’t prepare him for the ocean.

Water stretches out wide ahead of them, fills the entire horizon and maybe the whole world. There are small drifts of ash in scattered patches, but it’s mostly sand, coarse and dark and mixed with broken pieces of civilization at the edge of the beach, but fine and pale closer to the water’s edge. The sound of waves crashing down and hissing in retreat is so different from the engine’s rumble and the whine of the wind that both of them are nearly as transfixed by that as by the sight of the Atlantic.

Puck walks to the edge of the new-looking sand and toes off his shoes and socks, glances back with a little smirk. Kurt lifts an eyebrow but follows suit. He removes his own shoes more carefully, neatly tucking his socks into them, and meticulously rolls up his pant legs. Puck grins. He grabs Kurt’s hand and pulls him running and breathlessly laughing into the waves (Kurt sputters indignantly when Puck dunks his head underwater and they shout and splash each other until the dim sunlight fades into night).


End file.
